1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for administration of virtual machine affinity in a cloud computing environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
One of the areas of technology that has seen recent advancement is cloud computing. Cloud computing is increasingly recognized as a cost effective means of delivering information technology services through a virtual platform rather than hosting and operating the resources locally. Modern clouds with hundred or thousands of blade servers enable system administrators to build highly customized virtual machines to meet a huge variety of end user requirements. Many virtual machines, however, can reside on a single powerful blade server. Cloud computing has enabled customers to build virtualized servers on hardware that they have no control over. This causes a problem when a multi-tiered application has a requirement that two or more of its virtual machines reside on different physical hardware in order to satisfy high availability requirements or other affinity-related requirements. The end user in the cloud environment creates virtual machines through a self service portal, but has no knowledge of the underlining hardware infrastructure, and no way to assure that virtual machines that need to run on separate hardware can do so.